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The Falls - Chapter 4
by menme
THE FALLS
Chapter 4 - Fall from Grace
Wilson had told him once that love - true love - was the refusal to think of another person in terms of power.
The forest rushed by as he drove, northern firs caging the lonely highway. The moon chased him.
The oncologist had been talking about a case he had, a man who refused to allow his fatally ill wife to go home and die, browbeating her into fighting to the end instead, but Wilson's words had fallen into him, as they sat there in his office, still on the third floor back then, a year before his infarction, and had taken bitter root. Stacy (ah, but he couldn't think about Stacy now, the night pressing his windshield so reminiscent of her eyes, the place to which his highway led a vanishing point, as though once arrived he would cease to exist) - Stacy who near the end had said All you know of love is power, Greg.
A rest-stop where he might have turned and headed back loomed out of the night, a gouge of gravel road looping through the trees, and he passed it going eighty.
Where do you stop fighting for someone and let their will take over, he had wanted to ask her. Was it love to let someone walk away?
After Cooper's remark he had driven to Snoqualmie Falls, his thoughts as churned as the mountains of water shooting past the ridge, and had watched the mist claw upward. Waiting for a sign perhaps, thinking of his hands in Amalie's hair. Knowing no sign would be forthcoming.
The turnoff that Lubovsky, with grumbling-bear embarrassment, had described to him shot out of the night, the clapboard church on the corner, and he braked hard and turned. Another ten miles on a smaller road, the trees so near their branches seemed to reach for him, the cage closing in, then he came out onto a large parking lot before a rambling two-story structure that might once have been a barn. Audis mingled with junkheaps in the parking spaces. A flickering neon sign over the innocuous door told him he had found One-Eyed Jack's.
Men came and went without looking at one another. A teenager just exiting braced his hands on the wall, as if fearful the place would tumble down on him, and puked beer across his cowhide boots. Inside, the lowlife growing from the barstools studied him. No casino in sight. He had stopped at an ATM back in town for some large bills, anticipating a filtering system, and now he flicked his wad with the fifties at the bartender, who nodded and directed him straight past the bar to a back door.
The crowd in the casino was a different one, the music unobtrusive. Chandeliers lit red satin. Croupiers smiled at him. He watched a roulette wheel turn for awhile, drawing in the scent of good cologne and desperation, the sweat of men losing too much money, then made out the floorman, also unobtrusive, who would be the second step in the filtering system. Flicked his money at him and was accompanied to another door, which had to be unlocked and revealed a lushly carpeted stairway to the second floor. He peeled off a fifty and stuffed it in the guy's shirt pocket. Personal favor time. "I want a redhead," he told him.
The room he was led to was baroque lace, red and gilt dominated by the obscenely large bed in the center. He stood with his back to the door waiting, studying a long view of himself in the ornate mirror. He felt the brass head of his cane, like ice as he leaned on it, his hands cold. His breathing didn't seem to be working right. He had misunderstood Cooper, that was it. Some redhead would come in, no resemblance even to Amalie, and he wouldn't be able to do it with her, a cool five-hundred out the window, because his balls felt sucked up into his abdomen with the pressure, disgust presenting as a near-violent spasm, a withdrawal, and not only there, a tightness further up in his chest. Could a heart shrivel up and die? Good question, doctor.
Then the door opened and Amalie slipped in (he watched in the mirror, blinked once), still patting down the sexy-nurse costume she wore, oblivious to him, white skirt so short it flashed a hint of pantyless buttocks, a halter top that left the nipples free and pinched upward, pink and inviting, stupid nurse-cap on hair that fell to her shoulders. A memory of her bra strap flitted through his mind, as though it mattered anymore, that bit of white peeking out, so private, how the intimacy had seemed solely for him, while she had been leaving the hospital in the evenings to come here and let it all hang out for strangers. No, his heart wasn't dead - it was beating hard with rage, something inside him already shouting at her, then she turned and saw him, their eyes meeting in the mirror. She gasped.
The look she wore - not embarrassment, more a longing to die rather than know he had seen her like this - left him speechless, because it meant she cared. Cared what he thought. It meant everything, the reason she was shaking her head, her hand on her mouth in horror, turning back to the half-open door, as though having only appeared to him in a mirror she could make it unhappen if she just left, make him think it was a dream, then he was spinning, yelled "Stop!" and she froze.
He hobbled to her. Slammed the door with his cane. She wouldn't look at him, twisting to avoid his eyes, a rabbit in a trap, small half-sobs saying, "Please, no," that cut below his shouted words.
"What is it, Am? What is wrong with you?" He tried to take her arm, too much force. "Look at you -" She broke away. The nurse cap fell to the floor. "You're a doctor, for chrissake!" The words sounded like vomit, nausea and rage contorting the muscles of his face until it hurt. "You're an intelligent beautiful woman - what the fuck are you doing here?"
"Just leave me alone! You didn't have to come here, dammit - why couldn't you have just stayed away?" She sounded like a child. Her eyes fell on his, tears big, and she leaned back against the door, beating at his hands that plucked the costume in disgust. "Oh why couldn't you have left things the way they were?" The were was a wrenched sob.
"Oh right!" So loud he scared himself. They would come for him in a minute, throw him out bodily when they saw he wasn't there for business. "I was supposed to take my closet tidbits from you when I could get them, right? When all I was getting was sloppy seconds! From loggers who'd had it in you the night before. Goddamn you, Am!" She was shaking with sobs. "Goddamn you - I should have left town when I had the chance -"
"No," she moaned.
"The guy at the hospital who was rude to you-" he saw in her sudden grimace that he was right - "he wasn't making those snide remarks because he'd heard rumors. He'd been here. With you." Revulsion left him weak. He leaned one hand against the wall. "Jesus Christ." Fools didn't come any bigger than him. You got suckered in by the ones just fucked-up enough to hide it, why was that, you got used to lips on yours like it meant something, the press of a body so sweet against you it makes you want to cry because you haven't had much good in life. Because it feels so right for once. "Why?" His voice came out gravelly. She was crying so hard she couldn't speak, her eyes - so suddenly like Laura Palmer's - saying Please don't. "It was insane enough to imagine Laura Palmer coming up here. But you..." Another sob escaped her. "You don't need the money for some coke habit. You're not fucked up inside like her. What kind of sick thing do you get out of this, Am? Please, just tell me, I have to know."
She was muttering below her tears. He had to quiet his breathing to hear her. "I am, I am." So much an echo of what she had said in his apartment that it froze his blood. "I am sick inside. Oh please I - I think I'm insane. Oh Greg help me, I think I'm going crazy.
His arms were around her before he knew what was happening. Her crying wet his shirtfront. Slowly the tears subsided, becoming only breathy hiccups between which she mumbled things that might have been explanations, "I don't know" and once, "The pain." Images still raced through his mind, the same pictures of male hands on her that had plagued him when he thought she was seeing someone else, but magnified now a hundred times, men who tore at her clothes or bent her over their laps and spanked her, anything they wanted to do because they'd paid for the power over her. He tried to shut them out. Power was something else. He put his mouth near her ear and rocked her gently. "Talk to me, Am."
They sat on the absurd bed. She hugged herself, cradling her hands under her arms, and moaned, "Don't look at me."
"I'll look at you if I want to. I paid for it."
She gazed away for moments, until he thought she wouldn't speak. The depth of their silence funneled the sounds from other rooms to them, a client going at it, the bed squeaking, muffled laughter. When she spoke, her one word shocked him. "Power." His chest burned. "Some people think love is power. I was married to a man like that."
His throat clenched. Maybe he didn't want to know.
"I met Garret in college. We were the perfect couple. From the outside at least. From the inside, well, there were things that bothered me, but he was so suave and smart and the sex was...incredible." No, he didn't want to know. "Then we were married. It was all so perfect. But, after a few years, the things that bothered me started to - take over. Garret had always had an arrogant streak, machismo, and suddenly the sex had to be...demeaning."
He stayed very quiet.
"I was so insanely in love with him still, that I let it slip. I became someone who would do -" her breath seemed to run out " - anything for him. He slept with other women. He didn't care if I knew. He hurt me - physically - in ways that wouldn't show and I let him, I wanted him to because I thought it would keep him with me." Her eyes, gazing at nothing across the room, were huge. "I was sick. On the outside this successful, with-it doctor, and on the inside just...rotting. Loving someone who only knew that one way to express it." The sounds from the other room had stilled, the client having shot his wad. "Then I got pregnant."
Her voice was a dull hollow. He had his hand on her arm.
"It was a shock, an accident, but I became obsessed with this stupid stupid idea it would change everything, that we would suddenly be like other couples, a family. When she was born, she was so beautiful, you can't imagine. A beautiful tiny..." A shudder ran beneath her skin. "When she was three months old I killed her."
The words seemed to come from another place, a corner of the room, so that he almost looked away. He thought he had heard wrong.
"Garret's fooling around became worse after the birth. I had changed; I didn't want to play his power games anymore, I was obsessed with thinking we could be normal. He got farther and farther away from me and it was killing me. One Saturday afternoon, while the baby was napping." For a moment it seemed she wouldn't go on. "While the baby was asleep, we had a fight that ended up in bed. The first time in a long time. It was better - worse - than it had ever been, and I let him do it all because I was so happy for that attention. Because it meant he was back with me. It meant I was the one. I let him hurt me and humiliate me and he lost himself in it, like some kind of demon was riding him, and I was glad. I remember it running through my head, He loves me, he loves me, like a mantra. All that power - it was as though he was sucking it out of me, out of the air around us." Her whisper was so low, a wind far away in trees, that he had to watch her lips. "Feeding on hurt. When it was over, we both went to sleep. Isn't that strange?" She turned to him, barely seeing him through tears. No, he wanted to say, then realized she was trying to comprehend the long-gone moment, palpate it as a doctor might a lump, looking for the malignancy, a moment that had defined her life ever after. "We slept for hours. When I woke up I remember wondering why the baby wasn't crying. When I went in...she was dead."
He thought he had never heard words spoken with such sadness. Her head was bowed, red curls falling, wet with tears, around her face, and he thought how he had never wanted to see her hair down like that. He leaned his head into her shoulder. "Oh Am." You didn't kill your child.
"She was...cold." She gave a tortured shrug. "Crib death. That tells you nothing, you know? It can mean anything. She was born healthy, normal birth weight. They never found any reason. They just said she must have been dead for...hours." She paused, locked in horror. "About the time we were doing it."
"You didn't kill your baby, Am."
"It happened while I was doing those things with Garret. Caught up in trying to hold onto something that was sick and dying anyway. All caught up in my own needs."
"It's the survivor complex. Death is incomprehensible, someone has to be at fault, and so you make it yourself. What about -" - he didn't want to say the name - "your husband? Wasn't he at fault more than you?"
"He pretended to care for a while, but he didn't. We got divorced three months later. I quit my job, threw some things in the car and just drove." So familiar. "The first week, in a motel room, I -" She fumbled at the white-lace cuff that had replaced her leather armband in the nurse costume, hiding the scar. "I thought I couldn't go on, but when I made the first incision...something stopped me." She was lost in memory again. "Something black in the corner of the room. I walked out, to the motel office, to get help. The nice kid there, I scared her to death, dripping blood and shouting at her to call 911. And when that was all over, I just - drove again."
"And ended up in the woods."
She was looking at him now, challenging. "I went through every available man in town here the first few years, Greg."
"I know."
"I'm not sure why. I was looking for something. It wasn't love, I had decided I would never have that because I didn't deserve it. I think I was hoping for the opposite of love, another Garret maybe, who would make me feel so bad about myself that I would start living again inside just to defy it. I was dead, you know. A patient in the clinic told me where she had got her fingers broken. I think she saw something in my eyes, because she slipped me Jacques' phone number."
They had come full circle, to the thing he couldn't talk about, all the questions he wouldn't ask her: how often she drove up, how many times she had slipped into a room to find - as she had with him - that it was someone she knew. How she could have kept on. As though awakening from her story into his, he became aware again of his heart, still thudding with anger. How she could have kept on once she started seeing him.
"You think I'm sick, don't you?" She was challenging again, and at the same time pleading. "You want to know why letting men do anything they want to me would stop the pain? How I could keep coming up here when you and I -"
His hand hard on her wrist stopped her. "Just don't."
She jerked her hand back. "I want to. I want you to know. How everything started to - change after I met you." He closed his eyes. "You were the first man in years to look at me like I was a - a person. Something real." The word she was looking for was respect, he wanted to tell her. "I was in denial about you. I thought I had to punish myself for even thinking I could be happy with someone. I had to keep coming here." He thought of her look, always surprised after their sex, as though afraid to admit it made her happy, and the pain burst inside him. No, you didn't have to keep coming here; something made you.
"I was so scared of you finding out, because I would lose that respect. I would lose you. When Benny Wright started saying those things in the hospital - when I thought he was going to say the truth right there in front of you - I was so scared that the only thing I could do was walk away. Do you know why I told you to meet me in the operating room right after that? I thought I could just get you out of my system by doing you, by being a slut with you like I had with every other man, just get it over with and I'd stop feeling what I did for you." He couldn't look at her. "But it didn't work. I fell in love with you. I love you, Greg."
If a heart could hold anger and joy - stunned exploding joy - at the same time, then her words did it. You could hate someone for hurting you, he supposed, want to slap them and at the same time yearn to put your arms around them and crush them right through your skin because their words mean so much. He felt his hands on the edge of the bed and told himself he wouldn't move.
"You see now why I - I wanted you of all people not to order me around." Yes. "Tell me I'm morally bankrupt."
He tried to control his voice. "You're morally bankrupt."
She looked like he'd slapped her, then she looked down, relinquishing the moment, and fumbled again with the lace cuff. "You know, sometimes I think maybe I really died in the suicide attempt. That this is hell, this town."
"`The devil made me do it'? There's no Satan that made you do these things, Am." With his head he indicated the room.
"There is. Something here in these woods. As though there's something evil in the ground. People used to believe that if God was in heaven, then Satan was in the earth. I've sensed it here. Like a damp...rot. One that can rise up and make people sick. I come here to Jack's more often when there's fog between the trees."
The statement was so odd it chilled him, as odd as every other insane moment that had happened to him since Ronette's awakening. "And they used to cut up bodies looking for the soul," he told her. "Never could grab onto the slippery little bugger, though. Now we have MRIs and it still beats our pair of aces." She was watching him. "Maybe they should have looked for the devil inside us." That was where it was, wrapped around their intestines or behind their hearts. The black place in his brain. They had come from the ground, mud and clay, and a seed had been encapsulated in them as they evolved, a bit of root caught twisting at their cores, dirty and spewing poison. Or growing into a devouring beast, as it must have in Leland Palmer. Insane thoughts, that left him tired.
"It's in you too," she murmured. It was as though she read his mind. "You know who murdered Laura, but you do nothing about it. Palmer drugged his wife so he could rape his daughter at night, had probably been doing it for years, until it got out of control and he killed his own child. You have the tox screen that shows the mother was slipped something, but instead of just talking to the FBI agent, you drug the guy so you can plant a hypnotic suggestion in him." Her voice was matter-of-fact, as tired as he felt, no longer challenging. "Make him think in the right direction. Then you wake up Ronette to question her and you don't even make sure there are any real witnesses there in case she says something important." She turned to him. "Don't you see? It's the same...impulse that drove me here again and again. It's what makes you shy away from what you know. That keeps that brain of yours from working right."
"That puts me to sleep," he murmured. Lights were going off in his head, an image of himself kneeling by Cooper's bed as though drugged himself, Sheila slumping into lethargy as Palmer entered the hospital. A pillow, so soft as to be intangible, smothering them all. Fog. The log lady had said it: they all slept too well. "I spoke to Leland Palmer tonight," he told Amalie. "I think he killed Jacques Renault." The thought that the beast fogging his senses had kept him from seeing that connection earlier was frightening.
She was staring. "Jacques Renault is dead? But he only had a shoulder wound from the raid -"
"Someone tried to make him eat a pillow earlier this evening while the nurse was out buffing her nails. It had to be Palmer. He must have thought that if Laura's aberrant lifestyle got out, they might start looking at him as a suspect. Or maybe Renault knew he was lurking around here after Laura that night." Another memory startled him. "Amalie - Leland Palmer was in the Great Northern Hotel the night Cooper was shot. I saw him walk by a minute before I went up and found Cooper in his room." The lights in his head hurt. She was leaning into him like a child, part of the blood-red silk sheet drawn up to cover her breasts. They were as spent as though they had screwed, he realized.
"Go to Cooper," she whispered.
He looked at the baroque clock on the table by the bed, a porcelain shepherd and shepherdess doing it doggy-style or, he supposed, sheep-style. It said two a.m.
"Tomorrow," he told her. "First you're walking out of here and coming to my place with me. And you're making sure they understand here that you're never coming back." She seemed to be falling into his gaze. "Right?" For a moment he thought she wouldn't answer, then something like peace spread across her face. She nodded. "If you can't tell them, I will."
"Oh no, Greg. You can't let them know why you came here. If you try to assert some kind of right to me, they'll beat you up." Her voice said she'd seen it before. "Go out the way you came. I can tell them I'm sick and leaving early. They'll let me. I'm...valuable. I'll change and get my car out of the back and meet you."
He would have to let her. Relinquish that power, to gain it back. He took his hand from her arm and nodded.
Back out through the bar and to his car, firs that made blue-black skeletons in the moonlight while the lights of Amalie's car following behind skittered over him like a beacon, then they were on his lumpy mattress, holding one another, no thoughts of eroticism, bodies falling to sleep against each other. He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her. "Say it again," he whispered, almost ashamed. Like a child begging for a treat.
"I love you."
****
Fog lay heavy on the road in the morning. The police station was a low-slung building set among firs at the farthest reach of the main road. Lights were on in the back. It was six a.m. The hotel had told them Cooper went to work early.
Amalie waited in the car. He was directed by a shocked-hair and painfully inept deputy to a conference room where Cooper and Truman bent over documents while a blond secretary took notes. The table held more donuts than he had ever seen in one place outside a donut shop.
"You expecting the entire Seattle police force?"
Cooper looked up, pleased. "Dr. House. You're up and out early. Could I interest you in a bear claw?"
"You can take a flying fuck at your donuts." The blond girl's mouth fell open. "I'm here to tell you something. I want you to listen."
While he spoke, the tension draining from him with the words, Cooper studied the tox screen of Sarah Palmer he had handed him. He told them of Laura's odd reaction in the clinic room to the suggestion her mother might have been drugged and Ronette's hysterical words that could only be memories of the night of the murder. "Leland Palmer killed his daughter." Cooper looked at him. "He was abusing her, it got out of hand, maybe when he found out she worked at One Eyed Jack's, and he waited till she left there one night and followed her. He was probably all wrapped up in his little sex slave and couldn't take the jealousy -" The secretary looked down in dismay.
"Leland's a respected member of this town," Truman spit out.
Cooper's hand on the sheriff's arm told him who was in charge. "Our lead doesn't point that way, Dr. House."
"What lead - the demon one?" He eyed Truman.
"Why, yes."
He longed to swat the barely interested smile off Cooper's face, preferably with his cane. "Listen to me. A murder like this, everyone looks into the family first, everyone in the normal world out there would suspect the father as a matter of routine, everywhere except in this damn toontown. So what world are you living in? His wife was being drugged, in her home, night after night, and I've just shown you proof -"
"But everyone lies, Dr. House." Cooper shrugged. "Sarah Palmer could well have been lying about having taken it herself. It does not constitute proof of anything." He laid the tox screen aside.
"Dammit, you're all asleep! You can't be that numb to things around you. There's something wrong with this town!"
"I would be the first to agree with you."
"But you go off looking for dreams and demons and -"
"Dr. House, there is a demon loose in this town. If he's in Leland Palmer at present, as you seem to think, we'll find that out. But the demon's presence permeates the town. How else would you explain Amalie Parker - possibly the most intelligent woman in a hundred-mile radius - working up at One-Eyed Jack's? You did go and find her there, didn't you?" Cooper paused. Truman was pretending not to grin behind a donut he had brought to his mouth.
Damn you all. His cane was up before he knew it. One swipe across the table and plates of donuts careened onto the floor, sending sugar glaze and jelly across the papers and shattering china. They leaped out of the way, a shout popping from Truman. The girl backed into the corner, eyes wide.
"Yes, goddamit it, and that has nothing to do with it!"
Cooper's frown lasted less than a second, then he was smiling again. He dusted sugar from his pants. "Dr. House, I am conducting this case to the best of my ability. You apparently think I'm missing something."
"Yeah, a brain!" His hand was still tight on his cane.
"Leland's not in town anyway now, should I even want to question him. I've been told he left last night to stay at Pearl Lake a while, where he grew up." His rage shriveled inside him, a phrase beating like a bad song in his head, You're a fool for coming. "Laura's death has been hard on Leland, Dr. House. He needed a rest. But I wouldn't arrest him anyway. There's nothing to indicate this is a family matter. There was a very similar murder down the coast a while back, and now another girl is missing from town here. It forms a series."
He watched the secretary creep back to her chair near him, avoiding his gaze as she might that of a rabid Doberman. She started picking up donuts. Outside the window the dawn was still half dark. Passing car lights flashed by. He felt tired. "Someone's missing?" he echoed.
"Maddy Ferguson. Laura's cousin from out of town. She stayed with the Palmers a while after the funeral. She left town here last night, but never arrived home in Seattle."
"Oh, Leland's really keeping it in the family, isn't he?" No response. "You said you had leads, Agent Cooper?" Go on and cave, you fool. Go along with their inane theories.
"In communication with the spirits -" he groaned and it seemed to fuel Cooper's enthusiasm - "I've been told we have to look for someone named Bob. This Bob may manifest as a spirit himself or take over and act through a human, much the way a mara does." Cooper held out a paper from the table and brushed chocolate glaze from it. It was a police sketch of a man, gauntly intense, the features blank and yet somehow contorted with what one might have termed hunger, or sadistic amusement. He looked about forty. Hair, which the artist had streaked to represent gray, hung to his shoulders.
He felt his stomach tense. "Where did you get this picture?"
"Both Sarah Palmer and I have had visions about Bob and we worked with the artist."
"That can't be. I've seen this guy around town." The room froze; in the silence he could hear his own breath. His heart - that had stilled after his donut demolition - was racing again. He grasped at the elusive memory. Night wind in the trees, a car pulling away from a curb. "This guy's not from a vision. He was here in town..." Agent Cooper's knowing look dawned on him. All of them were watching him, he realized, as he might have gazed at a dying patient who was in denial. "No." He banged his cane on the table. No one jumped. "No, I am not having visions. You'd love to co-opt me into your insane, supernatural humbug, wouldn't you?" Cooper smiled. "Well, you can take your mysticism and cram it up your donut-holes - this guy's real, whoever murdered Laura is real, and it's as simple as that!"
"Then you've had no unusual experiences since this started, Doctor?" The question, so matter-of-fact, was one he couldn't answer because the images suddenly flooding his head had slipped down his throat and were threatening to choke him: his trance at Cooper's bedside, the stupefying moment in the hospital when the wind-up toy of reality had seemed to wind down as Palmer entered the lobby. His cane burning his hand. No, it wasn't that simple, because his brain hadn't been working right from the start, a cancer in it breaking open and spewing poison, something from the past buried so deep he hadn't been consciously aware of it, but if that was the supernatural, then he was the surgeon general. No, it was only himself, the same way Leland Palmer in some psychotic way was this Bob and probably had been since a man named Bob had raped him as a child. The incredible power of memory and experience locked deep in everyone, for good or evil. Not the supernatural - the subnatural. Depths.
No satan inside. Only us.
He realized he had been staring at the floor for several moments. They probably thought he was praying. "No," he whispered. He looked up, and then louder: "No." Cooper seemed pleased. "This is not about the supernatural." His words rang through the room. "This is about a father who raped and murdered his own daughter. It's real, it's possible, it happens in the real world. You want to create an excuse for the guy by referring to some vague evil that got inside him somehow? Give it a name - Bob - like you might a pet rock? Go ahead and do it. Call it psychosis or brutalization - but don't call it the supernatural."
"And where did Bob come from?"
Was there an answer? Bob was created in a cabin at the edge of a lake, in the act of evil perpetrated on a child... He tried to remember the news article about Palmer's kidnapping. And if the evil had been in the rapist to start with, where had that come from? Himself abused perhaps, twisted... A spiral of violence stretching backward into the past and forward forever. It made him dizzy.
"These spirits inhabit us," Cooper intoned, "and some call them psychoses or mental illness. Look at it your way or look at it mine. The effect in the `real' world is the same. Laura is dead." Humanness leaked through his voice, a sadness. "Maybe Maddy Ferguson too. We've been told by a spirit that Bob is inhabiting someone here who is in a house of wood with many rooms. That that is where we have to look."
"We thought of the Great Northern Hotel," Truman piped up. His eyes narrowed. "But if you leave out the wood part, that could be the hospital, couldn't it? Got a lotta rooms."
Cooper threw the sheriff a humoring grimace. Some theory (but they couldn't mean that) which the FBI agent did not entirely concur in. "You're new here, Dr. House." (Oh yes they could mean it). "If the father's the first to be suspected, then the out-of-towner is the next. You're the man from another place. And you were present at both my shooting and Renault's murder." His voice was firm but sad. "You do see, don't you?" He saw that they seemed to recede as his perspective shifted, hunter and hunted not what he had thought. His breath was fast again. "You always seem to be where something is happening, doctor, sneaking around to give unauthorized treatments - to me, to Ronette, our only witness, who because of you is now in a coma beyond reach. You conveniently find Jacques Renault and move items, ensuring your fingerprints will be on everything-"
"He might have still been alive -"
Truman's voice was grim. "Sheila said the monitors had flatlined. There was no need to disturb the scene."
They blurred in his view and he realized he was shaking his head, in a jerky movement that was almost a twitch. "Leland Palmer was there too, both times. I saw him in the hotel before Cooper was shot, and he was at the hospital last night." His shuddering breath made him sound like a recording. He wouldn't have believed himself if he were them.
"Which you've amazingly failed to mention so far. Why, even there in the hospital last night, one would think that item of information would have come up." Something held me back, confusing me. "You see, do you not, doctor, that this insistence on Leland Palmer, a man beyond reproach, could simply mean to us that you are trying to draw attention away from yourself? That we have to take that into account?" Cooper's gaze was hard. "My dream did show me a tall man who was really a midget." For a moment he seemed lost in thought. "A midget spirit crouched down inside him."
"Amalie Parker -" His alibi the night of Laura's death.
"Dr. House, when did you first come to Twin Peaks?"
Another shift in perspective. It was the end of their casual conversation and the first question in an interrogation. The sudden certainty that they had been watching and discussing him for some time.
You're being controlled, he wanted to scream at them. Don't you see that? And yes, if it meant he had to believe in spirits - though he would have called it lethargy, the evil inherent in them trusting Palmer's white-washed facade and automatically distrusting the stranger - then it meant the spirit of the place was misdirecting them. The magician's trick, make sure they concentrate on the wrong hand, the wrong suspect, while the culprit vanishes.
If they suspected him, it meant they were without any will or knowledge at all.
They were so still, the three facing him, they might have been a tableau. Puppets had no will. They played the roles assigned them. He had to take control. "Doesn't matter when I came here," he answered Cooper's question very slowly and clearly. "Because I'm leaving now." He had begun to back up. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the door. "I'm walking out of here. I hope you understand that."
The only movement in the room was Cooper's head tilting, the bird-like frown.
More than puppets. The buzzing in his head made it hard to think, their sudden quiet, even the sounds from the road beyond the window hushed. He had the sudden insane thought that they did not exist outside of him, that once he walked out, they would freeze in their positions, like a paused tape, as they already seemed to be doing. Winding down. Add solipsism to your symptoms of insanity, doctor. "Yes, a hospital has a lot of rooms," he heard himself saying. No response. His backward steps had reached the door. He turned and caned his way, trying not to think, or to think only of reaching Amalie, past gray halls and doors (had he come that far into the station?) until he stood on the front steps, the light thickening overhead into day that looked as if it might turn stormy, a normal overcast morning in the real world.
Amalie was not in the car.
****
The treetops swayed with a rhythm she knew.
She stood at the edge of the forest and watched them. Her heart had almost stopped. The moment she had slipped through the door at Jack's, already burying her own identity deep inside, where it would be safe from degradation, as she always did, until it was over - and then seeing him, the shape in the mirror so unmistakable...she had known then what it was to have a heart simply stop dead because it couldn't go on. What it meant to not want it to go on, because it would be easier to die than to face him. A feeling she hadn't known for years, not since she had stood over a crib and shaken a tiny shoulder in horror. Knowing the irretrievable slipping away.
He had stood shouting at her for so long, or it had seemed so long, the shock on his face like a scalpel, words stabbing, while she had wanted him to take her in his arms and say he understood, that it had become another, more perfect punishment. He was purging her, drawing the poison. And it had all come out.
She felt new. Saying `I love you', she had seen the look on his face before he could hide it, happiness gushing like an orgasm, blue eyes wide and soft, and she had known they were in a new world. One where the spell of evil on her was broken. One where he forgave her.
The forest before her rustled. It had beckoned as she sat waiting in the car, thinking about him, the fact that he would stay with her after all, and she had got out and walked the fifty yards to the forest's dark edge.
Watching the trees sway in the rising wind.
She saw Greg come out of the police station and stop at the sight of the empty car, his mouth open. She had never seen him frightened before. He hobbled to the passenger side and pressed his hands against the window. I'm right here, she wanted to call. I'm not going away.
"Greg -"
He spun. Relief flooded his face, and then a wary gaze beyond her to the vast black wall of fir behind her, as though he thought it might swallow her up, so odd it made her feel like one of those heroines in an old horror flick, always too dumb to grasp the warning of the monster creeping up behind them, the mummy or the werewolf; in a moment a horrendous hand would descend on her shoulder. She turned. Nothing was there.
He seemed to collect himself and hobbled to her. "A storm's coming," she told him, as though it explained why she had left the car. Wind blew a strand of her hair loose and he tucked it back for her. He seemed agitated. They stood for a moment watching the woods. "Sometimes, when I've been driving back from Jack's -" she felt him tense - "I've seen lights in the trees, where no road could be."
"Smugglers. Canadian drug runners." She waited for him to go on. "They didn't believe me." The rising wind threatened to drown his voice. Whatever had happened in the police station had not been good. "They - let me know they suspect me instead."
She stared. "That's insane."
"Of course it's insane."
"But I could tell them that we... I'll go in now and tell them."
"No." His hand on her arm stopped her. "Why would they trust you? You're a hooker." The casual way he said the word hurt. She couldn't look at him. "Cooper already thinks you're some kind of schizo. And it wouldn't matter anyway. There's something...wrong with them. They're drugged, like all the rest of the town. It's in the donuts or the pie or the coffee." Or the ground. She remembered their conversation from the night before. No, he wouldn't accept that, he had to have a material explanation. "I said to Krumberg once that it was encephalitis lethargica, but it's something worse." He was shaking his head. "Are other places like this?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"I was in my glass tower of a hospital so long, Am. I don't know what the real world's like anymore. Do they ignore evil like this in other places? Is it so hard for people to combat it?" He seemed to be asking himself. There was no answer.
A gust of wind shook them hard and bent the firs. "Come away from the trees," he told her. Superstitious after all. They weren't going to eat me, she almost said.
They sat in the car and watched the light-dawning day darken again with storm clouds. "Most people are broken in some way, Greg."
"I know that."
"You and I are...more broken than most. It's why we ended up in this broken town." She thought of his infarction, as he had told her about it, the girlfriend who had left him when he needed her. But there was something else. "When that boy - your patient - died, Greg..." She didn't know how to express it. "You lost all your confidence. Everything you believed about yourself. You need to believe in yourself again. If you think you're right about Leland Palmer, don't let them change your mind." Don't let this place change you.
He stared at her for so long that she had to reach out and touch his face, as though to smooth the doubt away, and it seemed to decide him. He started the car and drove. She didn't ask. The road out of town was deserted and they hit the highway without seeing a car. The first drops of rain spattered the windshield. It didn't matter where they were going, only that they shared this space, silent beside each other and sealed from the world outside. She watched his hands on the wheel, still tense. "It's all about children, isn't it?" she murmured. He covered his surprise. "About the children who died while we were supposed to be taking care of them." For him, she suspected, it was more than his patient in Princeton, something much older, so deep it was as buried as death, but she wouldn't say that; they weren't that far and might never be. She remembered his incoherent ramblings after she had woken him from his trance at Cooper's bed. Child sacrifice, he had said. Yes, that was it. Children sacrificed to adult problems, offered up, and abandoned. "Her name was Jade," she said. From the weight of his hands on the wheel, she knew he was listening hard. "She was so beautiful. I don't know why I was so...in love." Why the grief goes on. "She wasn't really a person yet, with a personality and all. She was just. Beautiful."
A turn-off rose before them and he pulled over and looked at the sign. It said Pearl Lake. "That's where Leland's gone," he told her. "I don't know what I plan to do. Confront him, bring him back. But I want to go there." It sounded insane. She would go where he went. She nodded.
They looked at each other for a long time, as if to acknowledge just how insane they really were, then he started the car back up and took the turn-off.
****
End of Chapter 4 - Reviews are always welcome !! The next chapter is the last...
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Legal Disclaimer: The authors published here make no claims on the ownership of Dr. Gregory House and the other fictional residents of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Like the television show House (and quite possibly Dr. Wilson's pocket protector), they are the property of NBC/Universal, David Shore and undoubtedly other individuals of whom I am only peripherally aware. The fan fiction authors published here receive no monetary benefit from their work and intend no copyright infringement nor slight to the actual owners. We love the characters and we love the show, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
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